How I Use WriteMonkey and WordPress (and Twitter and Posterous)

Recently I’ve had this foolish notion that you’d like to know how I go about writing these blog posts. Foolish because, really, like you give a shit. I need it out of my head; stop reading now if you don’t need it in your.

Almost exclusively I use a full screen text editor called WriteMonkey (http://writemonkey.com/). It’s free; leaves me with nothing more than I need to compose a post; the features it does have match my needs. There are other distraction free text editors which may appeal to you.

I have a file named “yyyymmdd.txt” I save this file in my Dropbox folder (https://www.dropbox.com/) which allows me to effortlessly synchronize this one file over all the devices I maight choose to write on: this computer, that other computer, my wife’s computer, the kids’ computer, or my phone—even your computer if I wanted. This ubiquitous file contains just a bit of text in it already:

First, some administration. I copy the date string and rename the generic file “20110312 Saturday”. This newly named file goes in that Dropbox folder too, but I rarely ever come back to them. After that, I Ctrl-tab back to that “yyyymmdd.txt” file and iterate the date and day count so that when I open it tomorrow I’m ready to roll. Finally, I Ctrl-tab to the new file with today’s date and start writing.

Once I’m finished writing I replace the “XXX” with the word count that WriteMonkey provides me and copy|paste the whole thing into the HTML editor in my 1000 Days WordPress CMS. I trim of the “//’s” because they are a useful text-hiding affectation of WriteMonkey but not a useful one for WordPress.

Once in WordPress, I swap over to the advanced editor tab and do a spell check to catch typos and misspellings. I extract a tasty pull-quote for the writing for the excerpt feature, title it, and hit publish.

WordPress is set up to cross post to my Twitter account (http://twitter.com/#!/douglasblaine) and to Posterous (http://douglasblaine.posterous.com/). According to Posterous stats I get about 200 reads for each post I make there. I consider this count about 10,000% more than the reality.

I Alt-tab back to WriteMonkey, Ctrl-tab back to the generic file, and hit Ctrl-Q to exit.